Joseph P. McDermott - The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850

This volume provides the first comparative survey of the relations between the two most active book worlds in Eurasia between 1450 and 1850. Prominent scholars in book history explore different approaches to publishing, printing, and book culture. They discuss the extent of technology transfer and book distribution between the two regions and show how much book historians of East Asia and Europe can learn from one another by raising new questions, exploring remarkable similarities and differences in these regions production, distribution, and consumption of books.

The chapters in turn show different ways of writing transnational comparative history. Whereas recent problems confronting research on European books can instruct researchers on East Asian book production, so can the privileged role of noncommercial publications in the East Asian textual record highlight for historians of the European book the singular contribution of commercial printing and market demands to the making of the European printed record. Likewise, although production growth was accompanied in both regions by a wider distribution of books, woodblock technologys simplicity and mobility allowed for a shift in China of its production and distribution sites farther down the hierarchy of urban sites than was common in Europe. And, the different demands and consumption practices within these two regions expanding markets led to different genre preferences and uses as well as to the growth of distinctive female readerships. A substantial introduction pulls the work together and the volume ends with an essay that considers how these historical developments shape the present book worlds of Eurasia.

This splendid volume offers expert new insight into the ways of producing, financing, distributing, and reading printed books in early modern Europe and East Asia. This is comparative history at its best, which leaves us with a better understanding of each context and of the challenges common to book cultures across space and time.

Ann Blair, author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age and professor of history, Harvard University

This engrossing account of the history of the book by leading specialists on the European and East Asian publishing worlds takes stock of what we knowand how much we still need to knowabout the places that books had in the lives of our early modern forebears. Each chapter is masterful state-of-the-field coverage of its subject, and together they set a new standard for future studies of the book, East and West.

Timothy Brook, author of The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties

Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge, Fellow of Emmanuel College, and Fellow of the British Academy. With Professor Asa Briggs he has written A Social History of the Media.

Joseph McDermott is Emeritus Reader in Chinese History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St Johns College. He has written widely on Song through Ming social and economic history, including A Social History of the Chinese Book.

Hong Kong University Press

The University of Hong Kong

Pokfulam Road

Hong Kong

www.hkupress.org

2015 Hong Kong University Press

ISBN 978-988-8208-08-1 (Hardback)

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Jack Goody

friend, scholar, and inspiration

This book is the outcome of a one-day workshop held at St Johns College, Cambridge, on June 23, 2009. Undertaken as part of a developing series of Conversations at St Johns, this workshop brought together a group of experts in the history of the book who happened to be in Cambridge at that time. Some of us specialize in the books of Europe and others in the books of East Asia. But we all have at times indulged in generalizations about the similarities and differences in the history of the book of these two broad regions. The time had come, we all felt, to test those understandings. Not knowing precisely what would come out of a conversation, we spent a delightful day learning how fruitful such a dialogue can be. Questions previously neglected or downplayed came to the fore, set conclusions fell under closer scrutiny, and a wealth of striking similarities and differences extended our perspectives beyond the parameters that enclose our usual meetings with fellow scholars in our particular fields of research. The intensity of that days discussions as well as its pleasures live on, we hope, in the papers collected here. Each of us left that workshop aware of the broader significance of our own study as well as our fellow authors, and on return to our original drafts we sought to rework our initial ideas into a paper that reflected the generous and learned comments of those present that day.

We wish to express our thanks to the Master and Fellows of St. Johns College, Cambridge, and the College Librarian Dr. Mark Nicholls for their help in making this workshop possible. To the librarians at the institutions that have allowed us to reproduce images of their holdings we are thankful, as we are to the external referees for their astute suggestions and to our fine editors at Hong Kong University Press for their help and patience in helping us prepare this manuscript for publication. A study of two parts of the world whose book worlds seldom interacted in premodern times, this collection of essays stands as testimony to the growth in mutual interaction and understanding that now marks scholarship on the book in East Asia and Europe. We hope more such studies follow.

Annual number of Ming imprint titles produced by decade and by type of publisher.

Decadal shifts in the production share of Ming imprint titles by type of publisher.

Woodblock-printing tools.

A Chinese moveable-type room, Jin Jian, Qinding Wuying dian Juzhen ban chengshi.

A Chinese oil squeeze, ca. 1610, in Wang Qi, Sancai tuhui (Ming edition).

Franco-Chinese male fashion in late seventeenth-century China, in Hu Yinling, Guanyin dashi xiansheng linying ji, print 51.

News in the Capital Gazette ( Jingbao).

Book production donors list, in Zhang Shiwei, Zhang Yidu xiansheng Ziguang zhai ji (1638 pref.)

First page in a copy of a banned title, Li Zhi, Lishi Fenshu (Mr. Lis book for burning) (Wanli era, 15731620, edition).

An objectionable idea in print, in Li Zhi, Lishi Fenshu (Mr. Lis book for burning) (Wanli era, 15731620, edition).

The idyllic book-printing site, Wang Xian, The Jigu Pavilion of Mr. Mao of Yushan (1642, detail).

Der Buchhndler by Jan Luyken in Johann Christoph Weigel the Elder (16541725), Abildung der gemein-ntzlichen Hauptstnde, Regensburg, 1698.

Catalogus universalis pro nundinis Francofurtensibus, 1622.

Accessions register and invoices book, Chethams Library, Manchester, England, 16551700.

A blind colporteur illustrated in Los Espaoles pintados por si mismos (The Spaniards painted by themselves) (Madrid, Gaspar y Roig, 1851).

Postal routes from Augsburg, Strassburg, etc., from Johann Christoph Weigel the Elder (16541725), Nuremburg, early eighteenth century.